‘Phantom’ MEPs to have votes from December

EU member states yesterday (23 June) opened an intergovernmental conference (IGC) to revise the EU’s Lisbon treaty – and closed the conference within 15 minutes, having approved an increase in the number of members of the European Parliament.

The IGC, at which the governments were represented only by their ambassadors to the EU, was convened because the last Parliament elections, in June 2009, were held before the Lisbon treaty was ratified. That prevented changes to the size of assembly envisaged by the treaty.

The elections were, instead, held according to the Nice treaty, which required the number of MEPs to be reduced from 785 to 736.

Yesterday’s IGC gave effect to a political agreement reached in December 2008 that, despite the delay to Lisbon ratification, the Parliament should be increased before the next elections in 2014.

The agreement needs the approval of national parliaments.

Protocol amendment

The IGC did not amend the Lisbon treaty, which states that the Parliament should eventually have 751 MEPs. Instead, it amended a protocol attached to the treaty on transitional arrangements. Those transitional arrangements were originally envisaged as taking the total number of MEPs from 785 to 751.

The protocol is now intended to take the Parliament from the current 736 MEPs to 751 in 2014, via 754 because Germany is being allowed to ‘retain’ three of its current MEPs. So the effect will be to add 18 MEPs to the current Parliament drawn from 12 member states. There will be four from Spain, two each from France, Austria and Sweden, one each from Bulgaria, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Slovenia, the Netherlands and the UK.

Ambassadors approved a decision that, although an IGC had been called, there was no need to call a convention to discuss changes to the treaty.

The national governments wanted to keep the IGC low-key for fear that in some countries it might prompt calls for a referendum.

The amended text says that the protocol “shall enter into force if possible on 1 December 2010”. Officials and diplomats hope that national parliaments can ratify the changed protocol by then.

From that date, the additional MEPs will have voting rights. Before that date, they are likely to arrive as observers.